An approach to urban regeneration by game theory and decisions

The contribution is focused on the main issues of urban planning for the contemporary city. Multidimensional nature of urban development requires specific policy tools and proposals for improvements in local and territorial governance (see UrbactII Report 2013). Interventions of urban and territorial planning require complex choices involving the selection of the priority actions in which to invest public resources, involving the community in the identification of objectives, and analyzing changes and improvements pursued by the policies implemented. Sustainable management of land use is investigated through the analysis of the main strategies formulated at national and European level. We also deal with the issues of demographic changes and social housing in urban areas which require social innovation and better welfare services, infrastructure, green areas, urban quality and sustainability. Tools and techniques applied in urban planning to define shared visions of urban development are also investigated to start a reminding about the optimality of land use (see Camagni, 2006; Maturo and Ferri, 2011, 2012). The need for transparent and reliable forecasts about the choices among alternative projects makes essential the use of operational tools for evaluation, taking into account both the quantitative and the qualitative factors of urban development (Roscelli, 2005). Decision making models under Uncertainty are treated, discussing the importance of assessment for interventions in urban areas to measure social, environmental and economic sustainability of urban regeneration projects (Colantonio and Dixon, 2009). Starting from the main evaluation issues for decision making support in urban choices, we concern with the social welfare problem as Arrow formulates it, and explore the multicriteria hierarchical approaches (Saaty, 1980; Saaty et al., 1990; Saaty, 2005) which are particularly suitable to evaluate the overall effects of urban projects and to deal with different and conflicting interests of multiple stakeholders involved in urban and territorial transformations (Lami, 2005; Bottero et al., 2008; Ferri and Maturo, 2012).